 Peter Aykroyd and his sister Judy Aykroyd Harvie. (Sun Media/Joe Warmington)
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He is often referred to as the Original Ghostbuster.
It's certainly not lost on the cast of the blockbuster movie; if there was no Peter Aykroyd, there would have been no Ghostbusters for his son Dan to write.
"It is true, both sons -- Dan and Peter -- grew up on it," laughed the 87-year-old author of A History of Ghosts from the very farm on Loughborough Lake, near Kingston, where mediums plied their trade and seances took place. "I can see how both Ghostbusters, and the TV show PSI Factor that Peter created, came out of my family's life- long interest in psychic phenomenon and spiritualism."
While Ghostbusters and PSI Factor combined truth with fiction, Aykroyd's own experiences were very much non- fiction and took place in the farmhouse on the property that has been in his family almost 200 years.
"As a boy, I used to watch the seances in the old farmhouse from a crack in the basement door," he said. "I had the sense of a presence that was quite extraordinary."
And he tells about it all in his interesting new 235- page hardcover, penned with Angela Narth. In it, he makes an interesting case that ghosts are merely the same physical matter that any living creature is, just not in living body form.
Although there are stories of levitations and apparitions, and correspondence with spiritualists Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it's not as much frightening as it is fascinating.
"Ghosts are the manifestation of a spirit that was originally alive in this material world," Aykroyd Sr. said. "Beyond the world we can see and touch there is an invisible world."
And Aykroyd sees it as the same kind of journey as perhaps splitting the atom or inventing cures for disease. "It's frontier stuff," he said. "It's stuff for scientists."
Aykroyd believes it is natural -- as ghosts are as normal and routine to the earth as any other energy form is.
"It's just as complex as people trying to get their head around eternity or how space goes on for infinity or how there are radiowaves in the air communicating that you can't see. I am not skeptical about what I experienced."
Aykroyd and son Dan will be doing a lot of talking on the subject in the weeks ahead as they promote the book, of which Dan wrote the foreword. Accompanied by wife of 57 years Lorraine, he and Dan will be in Toronto this week for an "In Conversation" evening with Heather Reisman at the Indigo bookstore at the Manulife Centre Thursday at 7 p.m. and a reading Friday at the Royal Ontario Museum.
There is no question he is getting a kick out this -- as he did in influencing the 1984 movie that remains the 55th-highest grossing motion picture of all time. "I saw the potential in it," says the former federal civil servant, who was the PR man for Canada's centennial celebration, Expo 67.
But the Original Ghostbuster?
Aykroyd believes that distinction is more suited for his grandfather, Dr. Samuel Augustus Aykroyd, DDS, born March 22, 1855.
"Dr. A was a follower of the movement known as spiritualism," Aykroyd writes. "He believed the human personality survives after bodily death and accepted the idea that those with biological life have the ability to communicate with those who appear to be minds without bodies."
Some of that communication, he believes, is done through paintings or photographs, in which images appear without the help of a brush, software or camera. You can see that in the Ghostbusters movies -- to go with the green slimy ghost that Hollywood created.
"When I read in Dan's script the scene with the Stay Puft Marshmellow on Fifth Ave. I said 'I just don't think it will play,' " Aykroyd says. "I encouraged Dan to re-write it. He met with Harold Ramis and Bill Murray and came back and said, 'The Marshmellow Man stays.' It became the largest-grossing comedy movie of all time so I guess they were right."
But there are no Marshmellow Men in his book and no ghosts of John Belushi.
This instead is high-end paranormal activity, with stories of seances, the mediums who presided over them and ghost stories -- passed down from his grandfather.
In 1973, Aykroyd and his sister, Judy Aykroyd Harvie, were cleaning out the basement of their late mother's home at 9 Garfield Ave. in Toronto when they found tucked away in a corner an old blue metal trunk that almost ended up at the dump.
"We pried it open and expected to find junk, instead we found history."
There were notebooks reporting on more than 80 seances and "thoughts, observations and conjectures that (his grandfather) clearly had hoped might somebody be shared with others."
Aykroyd says he is thrilled the information will now be shared. "Ghostbusters was directly derived from the blue trunk and I only hope Grandpa knows what fun he started!"
JOE.WARMINGTON@SUNMEDIA.CA
